A 14-year-old girl opened fire on Thursday (December 7) in a school in Bryansk, a city in southwest Russia, killing a fellow student before committing suicide, investigators announced in a statement. The girl “came to school with a shotgun, shooting her classmates,” detailed the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.
According to the Bryansk police, the shooter “committed suicide.” Five people were also injured, according to local authorities. Among the injured, two were slightly injured and three others were more seriously injured. According to the Russian news agency TASS, which cites the city’s children’s hospital, one of the victims was injured in the shoulder and knee, and is currently hospitalized in intensive care.
“The motives and circumstances” of the tragedy are being established, police said. According to TASS, the weapon used by the teenager was registered in her father’s name, and she also carried a “large knife” with her, hidden in her shoes. The father of the shooter is interviewed by investigators, according to the same source. They “are trying to find out how the weapon was stored at home, how the child was able to take it, and if [the father] taught the young girl how to shoot,” said a source within the forces. of the order to TASS.
Increase in gun attacks in Russian schools
“A terrible tragedy occurred today in school number 5 in Bryansk. One of the students brought a gun back with her to the school,” the regional governor, Alexandre Bogomaz, wrote on Telegram. According to him, the five injured are children. “My sincere condolences to the parents of the young girl killed by the shooter. It is an irreplaceable loss. The family of the girl killed and those of the injured will receive all the help they need,” he added.
Once extremely rare, gun attacks, particularly in schools, have tended to become more numerous in Russia in recent years. Vladimir Putin was alarmed, seeing it as a phenomenon imported from the United States and a perverse effect of globalization, which led him to toughen legislation on the carrying of weapons.
In September 2022, an attack in Izhevsk, central Russia, left fifteen people dead, including eleven children. In April 2022, a man opened fire in a nursery school and killed two children as well as a teacher, before committing suicide, in the Ulyanovsk region, also in central Russia.
In September 2021, a 19-year-old student killed six people at Perm State University. Having survived, he was tried and sentenced in December 2022 to life in prison. The deadliest attack dates back to October 2018, when a high school student killed nineteen people before killing himself in a high school in Kerch, on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.